These Are Our Lives: Education

In the field of secondary education Marsh believes that vocational training should be much more stressed than it is at present. Every student sought to have every opportunity to make out of himself what he can. But too many students are going to college who ought to be mechanics, farmers and other such occupations. He is opposing a grant of $10,000 to the local high school to build a gymnasium because of the debt the county and every town in it has to carry: if one high school had a gymnasium then every other high school would expect the same thing and the expenditure wouldn't be in keeping with the financial status of the local government. --Marsh Taylor, Landlord

"I quit that old second grade when I was fourteen. I left home and went to work. Been on my own ever since. I went down here to Woolard and went to work on a farm.... I would really like to learn. The boys they make fun of us when we can't read the funnies nor nothing. I look at pictures in books, and things like that in the recreation hall, so they won't laugh at me. I wish I had gone on to school now and would go as far as I could if I git the chance. Guess I couldn't git much learning now though, could I? I'm too old most to learn now." -- Milliard Ketchum, CCC boy

"I got no education atall. As I told you, I w'an't but nine when I went to work in the mill, and when I'd come home of a night I never felt much like learnin'. Sometimes Pa'd make me do a little spellin' but I never done so well at it. Then Pa died when I was twelve, and after that they weren't nobody to try to learn me. Ma never had a day's schoolin' in her life but she worked as hard fer her family as any woman I ever knowed. It was such a handy thing to have, and a body didn't know how unconvenient it was not to know how to read." -- Kate Brumby, retired mill worker

"I didn't git much larnin', jest the primary grades. Well, to the fifth grade, but that's the same as the eighth now. Folks don't know nothin' now. You can take these college graduates and put 'em up to talk. Why they can't talk! All my chillun's got a middlin' fair education." -- Clyde Fisher, Negro worker